The Museum Langmatt is showing Mark Wallinger’s paintings for the first time in Switzerland, providing an exemplary insight into his work of recent years. The focus is on large-format Action Paintings and new, polychrome Proteus Paintings in small formats. Painted or shaped with the hands, the pictures have an intensive reference to the body, appear conceptual and sensual at the same time. Despite all the differences to the French Impressionism in the collection, light and movement are the central pictorial elements here as well as there. The Action Paintings represent part of a larger concern with self-reflection, and how the traces of the hand’s gestures are indexical of the artist’s presence within the work: relaying movement and creating an unexpected illusory space that gives the paintings a curious photographic quality. Named after the shape-shifting Greek deity, Proteus Paintings are about the process of their own making, working with the medium’s facility for embodying change and transformation, in ways suggestive of both tiny and vast forces and the ambiguous space this conjures.

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